Comment by shartshooter

Fake management is far more common than real management. Most of management is centered around hyper-realistic work like activities.

No, this is exactly how Amazon management works.

Members of a team creates a report explaining the state of their small section of the business, usually a 2x2 grid of boxes to fill.

This is then reviewed, usually in an in person meeting that requires full team participation.

These are joined together to create a weekly business review, that will require another meeting to review.

Each month the WBRs are combined to created the monthly business review, with a massive meeting requiring participation by multiple teams.

The pyramid of documents and meetings continues all the way up to the CEO.

I should probably point out, none of this information is unavailable at any level, its copied and pasted from system to 2x2 then copied from doc to doc. It's a spectacle that needs to be seen to be believed.

And that just the reporting, planning is another exercise in multiple report writing that I'll save for another day. But, hopefully you get the idea.

Amazon is 90% internal document writing and 70% work (9-5 does not really exist, it could, it just doesnt).

It's essentially a massive jobs program for middle management that aren't capable enough to join the TSA and that's being unfair to the TSA.

The only reason I can think for the existence of the reporting is to give managers something to do between pipping staff.

> Real management work doesn't operate like this.

Don't know about Amazon but my experience with middle management is that it's exactly like that.

Actually I've worked at companies where management is exactly like this. Literally just status updates and asking when things are going to be finished. I have no respect for middle managers whatsoever. These people are a parasite on the industry.

>> gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him.

> Real management work doesn't operate like this.

I agree but in the opposite direction. So many managers not only doing that but doctoring, filtering and tainting it as well. So AI would be more effective for the most of bad managers.

I left amazon, in part, because of this realization: Much of management was exactly doing that. That was back in the BERT days and even then writing was on the wall.

> I think the person was feeding you a story around the campfire to impress you.

Yeah, this sounds like the guy was just exaggerating for effect. Haven't we all joked before, "I'm writing a tool to automate my own job away."

you would be amazed at the amount of middle managers who keep failing upwards in organizations like Amazon

Amazon in particular has a highly formalized ritual for reporting up and down that consumes managers entirely. If you don't play, youll be humiliated and fired. The engineers self-organize while the managers are working in their own, different universe.

lol. it does. its a good description of about 90% of the mgrs

[dead]

I kill jobs for a living, and always wondered when the promise of "Low code" would kill my job.

Turns out AI reduces the barrier juuuuuuuust enough for competent managers and clerks to automate their own processes.

Thank god most managers aren't competent, I might just make it to retirement.

>> AI will eat the "software professionals"

you mean AI will eat everyone, because if software professionals will be automated - all other white collar jobs will be too via software.

And then all resources will be poured in hardware and blue collar jobs will be automated too, at least those that have more value.

There might be a time when software developers become obsolete, and I don't pretend to know the future, but if today's models are anything to go by then it won't happen any time soon.

At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks like.

this is a very pessimistic take

could be, but the universe is odd in so many different ways

it's hard to be sure

Ha, that was exactly my thoughts to! Code is turning into a commodity. Nothing special anymore or something you need to protect. It's turning into cheap coal.

They should reboot Silicon Valley with this premise.

IMO, this is one of the better takes in this thread. I'm a big fan of Hazlitt's book Economics in One Lesson, which gives a very condensed version of some economic ideas - one of them being automation, with really good examples in the past of labor saving machines like the printing press being created. When I first read it a decade ago I didn't think my profession might be like the printing press, but it's definitely in the crosshairs now.

If I lost my software engineering job tomorrow and was unable to find work within a few months, I have a repurposing plan ready to go. Yes it would be terrible for me economically and I'm sure there would be some sad days, but sometimes bad things happen and we have to make the best of them and move on.

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.

If this is what you think needs to happen and you live in the US, then you should be freaking out right now, not calmly posting takes like this. UBI is not a thing almost any current American politician is considering, and the overton window is speeding in the opposite direction.

You should not expect people to be reasonable about this. I don’t know what the answer here is, but if you want it to be UBI, you need to fight for it. The alternatives (artificial price controls, the dumb make-work policies you correctly disdained, first-amendment-breaking/privacy-violating AI bans) are out there, and if you don’t fight for the thing you want, you’re gonna get one of those.

> We no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have telephone operators.

As you point out we've had plenty of examples in the past of jobs being displaced but (while I'm sure it always sucked to be one of the people displaced) those displacements were always relatively contained to certain industries within different time periods.

The nightmare-inducing aspect of AI-related job displacement is the possible combined breadth and speed of it, which we have absolutely never seen before.

Assuming the optimistic (from the perspective of the AI providers) AI predictions pan out the oncoming rush of AI job displacements are going to upended a lot of industries simultaneously, causing both increased uncertainty of what the (stable) other options are (the ground will be shifting everywhere, all at once) plus drastically increased competition for whatever other options do still exist when the music stops playing. I don't think it'll work out for us all to be nurses, plumbers, electricians and influencers.

> Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.

I agree that these sorts of solutions are the rational way forward, but it just seems incredibly unlikely that this is how it is going to play out, at least in the US where we seem to be putting approximately zero political or corporate effort into planning for these possibilities. A violent class war seems far more likely of an outcome to me if we're being honest.

The fear, which many (like myself, and Andrew Yang) have since before GenAI hit it big, is that the coming automation revolution will be magnitudes more disruptive than prior economic revolutions. It's one thing for particular skilled industries to evolve or go away; it's another when massive, diverse, frontline-and-management roles across the economy will all be wiped out in the coming decade or two.

Management, warehouses, logistics, driving, retail/service industry, entertainment and advertising, programming/software engineering, even research and education. Potentially tens of millions of jobs in the US alone.

COMBINED with the seemingly zero discussion in mainstream politics about improving the welfare system of the country to prevent system-scale unemployment and poverty, while the profits from "efficiencies" go to the small group of already-wealthy shareholders and owners.

Just lost my UX Researcher, Designer, UI Developer and CX Support job (8 years) two weeks of ago. They said doing a great job but have to lay you off. Within a week i put my house up for sale and received an offer.

Time to downsize, "try," to stay in tech yet study to be a nurse.

My field and career of 20 years seems like a vanishing one.

I'm going to sound like a luddite I'm sure but I'm tried of these analogies using horses, tractors and so on. Labor involving muscles was replaced with tractors but people could just switch to using the other half of their body; The Brain. Now that a lot of the creative tasks and knowledge work is being replaced there isn't anywhere for those people to go. Maybe people with esoteric industry knowledge, vibe-coding skills or trade skills will be fine.

For a while. It will be musical chairs without many chairs as a growing number of people retrain into a fixed or shrinking job pool.

> At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens.

I actually wonder if solving this problem - this feeling of powerlessness in the face of progress is an interesting problem to solve in our time. Plenty of people have figured this out. The Amish, people move to islands and other countries to not be part of modern progress.

"Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. " Why not? I mean Keynes argued something like: if the Treasury filled old bottles with banknotes, buried them in disused coal mines, filled the mines with rubbish, and then left it to private enterprise to dig them up again, there would be no more unemployment and the real income of the community would probably become a good deal larger than it actually was."

But it really does feel sometimes like. Why do we feel this powerlessness to progress? Why can't we architect the world we want to have? I have really been wondering. Lots of religious groups want to revert some progress. Maybe these whole network cities folks have a point. Maybe we can have a city like pegged to the like technical and architectural standards of the victorian era.

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me.

It’s going to sound naive and stupid, but I think it somehow works. There are millions of jobs here in Japan that exist for the sake of existing. Government knows, people know, workers know as well. But everyone understands that the flipside also sucks. Sure, we can say we should optimize and people need to re-learn and etc and etc. But that’s not the reality. At some point people just want to exist without worrying about 50 years down the road, or if they can feed their family tonight.

have been hearing from several ex-AWS colleagues about the job losses within their teams and the number of people impacted since yesterday. it’s depressing, but also symptomatic of a much larger obvious shift already underway for some time now, now being further accelerated by new technology.

AI and automation are rapidly erasing roles across both white and blue collar work. this is now a present present reality in almost all sectors. extrapolating this, it is clear this ongoing displacement will drive successive waves of unemployment and underemployment, placing severe strain on social contracts and accelerating societal instability. countries with strong social compacts may weather the coming storm. but others, especially those with larger population that lack "cultural ballast" >cough USA< will likely to slide into chaos, if not outright anarchy.

harder question to ponder is this: in a world where human labor is no longer the primary allocator of income and resources remain finite, sustaining nearly half of today’s global population under existing economic models begins to look fundamentally untenable. china’s one child policy starts to feel less irrational and more prescient.

beginning to think that perhaps I should be advising my kids to learn a trade on the side, as a backup plan, even as they chart their budding careers in the corporate world.

Thinking that because in the past the effect of progress was a net positive after a while it will always be like that is a cognitive bias. When looking at the large scale, in previous cases, people replaced by automation would go into jobs that were not automated.

But what will happen when there is no job that can't be automated anymore ?

This is exactly how I feel. I entered the software industry right before GPGPU programming was becoming a thing. I was aware of AI and neural nets back then and saw the future and decided I wanted to be part of it.

So what if my job is no longer a thing in several decades. That's the entire point.

There's infinite number of ways to make a living. My way isn't better than anyone else's.

People willing to adapt will always have opportunities awaiting them. The world is rich and fruitful.

Plus all the fun parts of computer science are still remaining to be pondered. The fun of computers is the high of the aha moment, not the coding lol

The people benefitting from the profits accumulated from layoffs would never allow their margins to be cut by having to pay for UBI. Why do people act like this even remotely on the political horizon? There will simply be an even larger underclass and the wealthy enclaves will build higher walls. “At least the companies will be more efficient” is such a cucked take, insane

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward

Everyone works 20 hours/week.

The 'problem' isn't what you think it is. The people in power are worried that lifting the boot off of the neck of the working class may result in loss of power for them.

They are right. Hence the stalemate.

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me.

That's what the TSA is in the US

What progress? Our planet is dying and those who have most loudly touted "Progress" are the ones killing it.

If "Progress" means a massive immiserated underclass is necessary for it to proceed, then who is it for? The answer is obvious.

The alternative is indeed UBI, and the obvious way to fund it is to tax automation so that it actually scales to however many people end up without jobs.

But for all the talk about UBI in techbro circles, it seems to never actually translate to any meaningful political moves. Microsoft, Amazon etc are pretty happy to throw millions of dollars at politicians to ensure that they can keep building their data centers, but UBI just gets lip service.

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me.

And what is? AI slop? There is no objective purpose to any of this, all of it is preference.

I prefer that people have a way to express themselves in a way that gives them subjective meaning, maybe a bullshit job is a good enough solution.

> Actual effective managers do much more

And how many managers are effective vs. only information funnels?

In some organizations, the upper management generates a real burden on people below them with ever changing demands for information.

I have to assume some of it serves a social, rather than practical purpose, like having people re-assure them that projects are going well. If that's the case, automation may just not make sense.

might be able to get a fat contract fee from letting Amazon know about that

"What would you say you do here?"

I agree and I also think a lot of what used to require the cloud is now becoming local and private.

Cost structures are changing everywhere, not just in big tech. Hiring has stayed about the same everywhere else and the job descriptions for an SWE in the normal corporate world seem focused on getting off AWS, GCP, etc.

when you consider AMZN's p/e ratio is under 35 and WMT is closer to 45, what makes you think this?

Tell you what, why don't we get rid of management altogether and just have a flat org ?

lol thank you I was trying to see if anyone else also read this with a raised eyebrow. “Yes so these ICs and other non-management staff are going to be reporting to this LLM and then magic and executives are informed of everything they need to know.”

Let's split the difference and put a brain on a Roomba like in Fallout.

> “He should’ve been so aware that his job was going to be the first one cut, and he was responsible for building a tool to cut his own job”

> That tool was going to get built whether he did it or someone else did. Maybe only thing to do is buy time building it while actively looking elsewhere.

This has such a dark vibe to it that I am unable to explain. It really feels like an I was only following orders command just hoping that you don't get to the wrong side of this stick as they was hoping for

At the same time protest isn't an option. It does feel like some form of active suffering for someone to write the replacement of themselves while the economy goes to complete dumpster fire and nobody's hiring (much).

All while Completely pure form of AI slop goes up and up so even any interesting idea or anything will have to fight really hard for attention in public spaces like say show HN or other websites.

So you are forced to pay "Internet rent" to the overlords like Google & Meta who will use the same money to then train better models (especially Google?) to continue this cycle.

All while people lose their privacy and nobody even talks about it. With all the thousands of problems happening.

Can we please just stop this circle just once and evaluate where things are going if they are net positive for humanity itself & if there is anything to stop this cycle.

Fundamentally most countries are democracies. Yes there are lobbying efforts but one forgets that these large corpos pay to somehow pursuade you or the politician that you elect.

Can someone smart in politics talk about such issues & raise them & a fight towards lobbying/corruption (all throughout the world?) be established.

I guess this becomes way too broad of a goal but somehow I always end up feeling corruption and politics & money's lobbying connection can be a root cause of many issues (much throughout the world)

the answer is build it again and start selling it to other companies.

> I always thought that a manager should push product vision at their own level, get and organize resources, and assess the talent as fairly as possible.

LOL, reality is very different. Manager first of all is working to keep his position, second to get promoted. Most of them. For keeping he need to become irreplaceable. For that they create kill zone around eliminating competitors. Working against those with brain, not promoting, giving negative reviews, creating 'cases', taking credits for others job. Making those who can leave. I've seen a lot of this shit. This creates a local depressive shithole. It can go for decades in monopolies and in low competition markets.

Or Office Space (warning, Rated R for some language and crude distractions / conversations.) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804

Still, it documents the typical work culture of the US in the late 1990s / early 2000s. It's sad and amazing how much of that remains the same.

Yes that is how anecdotes work

> If I set aside for a moment, and for the sake of argument, the fact that we all have to earn a living

Congrats for making an argument completely disassociated from reality.

I guess people need money to buy food to survive?

> I would be so friggen happy I don't have to do this BS job anymore.

Alright the freezer's empty with no food and you have no money. Probably a family to manage with kids and demands or say have hobbies which costs money.

I am an extremely frugal person myself but even I will admit that there is just no way that one can purely just exist without a FIRE & even within FIRE some aspects of FIRE want you to have a job but not only just any job but the job you like.

Judging from GP's comment. I feel like the person they are talking about might not have saved enough money so they were a bit worried about it but even if they did, losing a job still impacts mentally and they (didn't?) want to go through such transition.

I guess the point is to really save money & be frugal at times. It's usually something which benefits me but I am single right now but I can imagine that with a family & a wife & different dynamics, frugality can be hard to live by when you have to convince your wife to say down-size or your children to & it can impact one's freedom probably.

Personally wishing to have a lot of savings to go through when single before getting married.

Unironically this & some sense of getting respect within society & getting the prospectus of some good dating connection in such sense is the reason why (many) people look for any jobs.

I will admit that if someone offers me such a job, the offer to take will be hard to resist (even though I would consider I have a stronger than average desire for a job that I truly like/enjoy fwiw)